"I'll Be Back in an Hour. Are You Boys Sure You Know What You're Doing?"

Monday, April 16, 2007

Blame Us

[posted by Callimachus]

I give up. Everything is America's fault. Always. I'm going to write a book listing the 100 greatest calamities of all time, and explaining how they are exclusively the fault of Americans.

You think it can't be done? OK, give me one you think will be hard. Say ... The Black Death.

Piece of cake, ducky. Sure it struck 150 years before Columbus sailed. But as we all know, time (or "time") is an artifcial, patriarchal structure imposed on a fluid reality, where in fact influence and effect, author and text, flow back and forth through one another. A reality-based approach to this issue will, therefore, reject the two-dimensional projection of the Male Gaze represented by "before" and "after."

A mutated variant of Yersinia pestis might spread very slowly in a world of self-sufficient socialistic gender-equality communal cultures and be tempered by evolving resistances. Instead, thanks to the capitalistic, individualistic mercantile men, the plague bacteria shot through Europe like electricity, riding up the rivers and into the seaports on shipboard in a matter of three years.

Meanwhile, the scientific discoveries that might have helped Europeans discover the cause of the disease, and develop appropriate treatments for it, was stifled by a dominant religious culture that repressed such free inquiry.

And where, in the centuries since, have both Europe's predatory capitalism and its Christian repressions migrated, settled, concentrated, and merged? You got it, ducky! What caused those tens of millions of deaths in Europe is ... the mutant human nature currently embodied in the United States of America!

The Irish Potato Famine? Ginned up by the corporate ancestors of Halliburton so they could import cheap labor willing to work the looms for pittance.

The 1918-19 influenza pandemic? Direct result of World War I, which an unwilling and peace-loving Europe was thrust into by the manipulations of American big money men.

Red Chinese famine of 1958-61? No one would have starved if the Chinese had not been forced into extreme measures by the hegemonistic policies of the Eisenhower administration, backed by the rabid anti-communist lackeys in the corporate media.

Bangladesh floods of 1970? As we subsequently have learned, all bad weather is a result of man-made climate change, and all climate change in geological history is the result of SUVs and NASCAR tailgate barbecues.

I'm telling you, it can be done. And it would sell. I'm writing a cover letter to George Soros even as you read this.